God and Politics

When Billy Graham went to Flushing Meadows in 2005 for what was billed as the last revival in his 60-year career, he was joined on the platform by his fellow Southerner Bill Clinton. Clinton told the crowd how his Sunday school class had attended a Graham revival in Little Rock, Ark., in 1959. Despite the objections of local leaders, the former president recalled, Graham refused to segregate his services, inviting blacks and whites to worship together at a time when harmony between the races seemed impossible. “I was just a little boy,” Clinton said, “and I never forgot it, and I’ve loved him ever since.”

This is one of the stories that can be told about Billy Graham and the civil rights era — a narrative that portrays the preacher’s role in his native South’s reluctant abandonment of segregation as essentially heroic. Graham’s rise to prominence as an evangelist coincided with the turbulent years between Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964, and throughout that decade he wrote and sermonized in favor of racial harmony, staged desegregated rallies in balkanized cities, and counseled obedience to court rulings and legislation that many of his fellow Southerners were determined to resist. As a voice for both Christian conservatism and racial progress, he served as a bridge between the Old South and the New, and as a model for a region struggling to shed its worst baggage without losing its identity.

That’s one story. But there’s another story as well, one that paints Graham as a coward and an apologist for racial backlash. He supported desegregation but took few risks on its behalf; he cultivated a studied moderation in a time that cried out for moral clarity; he was more interested in flattering the white South’s self-regard than in calling his region to true repentance. As a steadfast supporter of Richard Nixon’s career, from the 1950s down through Watergate, he simultaneously enabled and embodied Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” which shut civil rights liberalism out of power and turned the region Republican for a generation.

Neither story is the whole truth, but both are true. And it’s a credit to Steven P. Miller that his “Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South,” a study of the evangelist’s relationship to the cause of civil rights on the one hand and the cause of conservatism on the other, does justice to the tensions and complexities involved — for Graham, for the South and for the country. In Miller’s account, one of 20th-century America’s most important religious leaders emerges as a representative political actor as well, whose example is worth pondering less because he was courageous than because he often wasn’t.

The story of the civil rights era is usually told as a collision between heroes and villains: the marchers on one side and the K.K.K. on the other; the Martin Luther Kings and Lyndon Johnsons making the way straight for justice, and the George Wallaces and Bull Connors standing sneering in their way. But the movement’s successes and failures were ultimately determined by the choices of more un­heroic men — men like Billy Graham.

These choices began with Graham’s decision, in the early ’50s, to shed the baggage of his segregationist upbringing and recast himself as a racial moderate — a critic of Jim Crow, albeit a determined gradualist where its elimination was concerned. This was a moral and theological conversion. Miller, a historian, is very good at teasing out the connection between Graham’s religious views and his evolving opinions on race, and the way that doctrinal controversies within evangelical Christianity (for instance, the argument between moderates and fundamentalists over whether God is a father to all mankind, or only to all believers) intersected with political debates about racial equality. Yet it was also a career-minded conversion. The young Graham had grand ambitions for his ministry, and to become an international spokesman for Christianity, in the age of the cold war and decolonization, required distancing himself from the South’s controversial institutions.

But a similar combination of theological principle and careerist caution meant that Graham’s critique of segregation never went nearly as far as civil rights activists wanted him to go. He stressed individual conversion over political change, supporting legal reform in lukewarm terms while insisting that only the Gospel could really improve race relations. He maintained strong friendships with segregationist clergymen and politicians, and his attacks on racism were always tempered by deliberate hedges and straddles — denunciations of extremists on “both sides” of the debate, suggestions that race relations were worse in the North than in the South, and so forth. Where Martin Luther King used eschatological language as a spur to political change, Graham used eschatology to emphasize the limits of politics. “Only when Christ comes again,” he reportedly said after King’s speech at the March on Washington, “will the lion lie down with the lamb and the little white children of Alabama walk hand in hand with the little black children.”

At the core of Graham’s approach, Mil­ler argues, was an evangelical view of political authority as essentially God-­given and not to be lightly challenged. This made him a natural ally for presidents like Dwight Eisenhower and Johnson, who needed prominent white Southerners to serve as spokesmen for the acceptance of desegregation laws. And it enabled him, as Miller says, to “set the terms of the racial curve” that even as strident a segregationist as Wallace “would eventually round.”

But it made him a fair-weather friend to the civil rights activists themselves. Graham supported the era’s landmark legislation once it was passed into law, but he was a constant critic of the marches, demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience that helped make reform possible. His first commitment was always to law and order, and his first instinct was always to call for an end to further agitation.

Which is to say that the revivalist would have been a natural Nixon voter even if the two men hadn’t been great friends. The Republican pitch to white Southerners included its share of racist dog whistles, but it was built primarily around appeals to self-conscious moderates like Graham, who accepted civil rights legislation but mainly wanted to put the issue behind them. Nixon’s 1968 campaign reached out to the more reactionary Deep South, but it “focused on the region’s growing Sun Belt metropolises,” Miller writes, “invoking a rhetoric of racial colorblindness, rather than racial backlash.” By the late ’60s, Graham was working both sides of this courtship — as an informal adviser to Nixon and a booster of the appealing but implausible idea that the emerging “New South” had escaped its racial demons.

The Nixon era was the high-water mark of Graham’s political activism. After the embarrassments of Watergate, he retreated to the more apolitical ground that he would occupy for the remainder of his career and left the cultivation of the Sun Belt-Republican alliance to more partisan figures. But the alliance itself endured, and historians and polemicists have been wrangling over how to judge it ever since.

In one story, Sun Belt Republicanism was a coalition forged in cynicism and denial: it perpetuated real injustices while denying they existed and relied on the votes of bigots to achieve political dominance. In another telling, though, the majority that Nixon built managed to achieve something that seemed impossible at mid­century — using the rhetoric of Christianity and colorblindness to reconcile the white South to a legal and social revolution, and confining the once-ubiquitous support for segregation to a lunatic fringe.

Again, as with Graham, both of these stories are true. And Steven Miller’s book offers a valuable contribution to the debate precisely because it manages to tell them both at once — to emphasize not only the black and white of a polarizing era, but its many shades of gray as well.